Skip to main content

Add Language Translation Flags To Your Blog for Non-English Speaking Visitors

What's you first reaction when you land on a website that's written in Russian, Chinese or Japanese ? Most of us would hunt for that English language translation flag and if that's missing, we will copy-paste the site address in Google Translate website to convert the site content to English.

Way too much effort. Now let's reverse the roles and say somebody from China or Japan visits your blog (written in English). The foreign visitor will have exactly the same problems that you faced when you were visiting that non-English website above.

Since more than 65% of web users speak a language other than English, it is essential that you provide language translation features in your blog so that you don't miss the non-English speaking traffic.

So when an Arabic visitor passes your English blog, he or she can just click the Arab flag to translate the website into his native language - That way you don't loose a visitor plus he could even subscribe if the content is good even if written in another language.

Here's a quick tutorial to add language translation to your blog. You can be any blogging platform including Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress that provides access to templates. The visitor will see nine country flags corresponding to German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian languages.

All you have to do is copy-paste the following lines of Javascript code anywhere in your blog template.

<form action="http://www.google.com/translate" >
<script language="JavaScript">
<!-- 
document.write ("<input name=u value="+location.href+" type=hidden>") 
// --> 
</script>

<input name="hl" value="en" type="hidden">
<input name="ie" value="UTF8" type="hidden">
<input name="langpair" value="" type="hidden">
<input name="langpair" value="en|fr" title="French" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539949_e76af75976.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|de" title="German" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539933_041ca1eda2.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|it" title="Italian" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539953_0384ccecf9.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|pt" title="Portuguese" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539966_0d09b410b5.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|es" title="Spanish" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539946_2fabed0dbf.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|ja" title="Japanese" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539955_925e6683c8.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|ko" title="Korean" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539958_3c3b482c95.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair" value="en|zh-CN" title="Chinese Simplified" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/14324441_5ca5ce3423.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">
<input name="langpair2" value="en|ar" title="Arabic" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3709/485/1600/arabic-flag.gif" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30" />
</form>

Actually the above tutorial is an enhanced version of our previous Language Translation Tutorial which was a bit out of date since Yahoo acquired Babelfish and WorldLingo changed their translation URLs.

Though the machine translation powered by Systran is generally not as correct as the service offered by professional translators, not all of us can afford an human powered translation. Plus the non-English visitor can alway connect the dots and make some meaningful sense of your content.

There's no translation support for Urdu, Russian, Hindi, Telugu or other Indian languages.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.